General Overview

I know I keep on writing in the past blog posts that I will be starting to put up a series of simple tutorials on WordPress theme development. But, here I am again with yet another local environment tutorial. If you are unfamiliar with the term local environment, I suggest you check out this blog post I wrote from last year regarding that term first before you proceed. I also wrote an omake post about Local by Flywheel, which is what we’re going to use on this tutorial. 

But wait! This particular local environment tutorial actually is related to WordPress! This tutorial would really help hobbyists who are curious about how to really create their own WordPress sites with custom themes and plugins, the local environment step is very important. It’s important because you won’t have to deal with several problems and issues right after you publish your site up tothe web and then you’d have to slap that “Under Construction” note on the main page again. That was back in the days. We won’t have to do that ever again at this day and age.

As mentioned earlier, I suggest you read my past article about the local environment so you can have a better picture on what this tutorial is about. All the pros and the cons with local environment are on those articles too. Here are the links again:

• All About the Local Environment
• [OMAKE] DesktopServer and Local by Flywheel

Introducing (Again) Local by Flywheel

I mentioned before that I normally use AMPPS to do my local development with my WordPress sites. I also use AMPPS to test and run other PHP-based scripts too, such as forum scripts, etc. As of late of last year, I started testing out Local by Flywheel and built my new child theme for my personal blog for 2018.

What made me decide to use Local by Flywheel (LbF) as of late? I’ve taken a lot of newer, more in-depth courses on WordPress Theme and Plugin development, and all have recommended LbF for a much faster, more convenient local environment setup. Besides, it has a lot of features that you can take advantage of that you couldn’t do with the other local environment suites mentioned (that also includes AMPPS).

LbF features plenty of good stuff that you can have fun with. Here are a few notable ones:

• Demo URLs (you can share this demo URL to all your friends and colleagues so they can take a live preview of your under construction site without uploading anything into your remote/live web server, unlike the old days)
• Supports multisites (you can create your WordPress site as a multisite, tweak with it, and you can also back up and install your site to your remote/live server)
• Provides automatic SSL protection (with Google and other industry standard web browsers, search engines, etc., every website, especially business sites, are now required to have an SSL certificate in their site to protect themselves from getting malicious attacks. LbF will automatically add SSL certificate to your local URL so that your computer will be protected from getting attacked)
• You can use LbF to test and run non-WordPress PHP script sites (Just install WordPress the same way, then delete all the WordPress files from your folder. More on this much later.)

You ready to get started? Let’s do this!